Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

For Turnaround Management, Buck (Showalter) the Status Quo

Beyond Baseball, when you inherit a struggling or failing department, you
usually have a short time to initiate actions that will turn it around. Shorter,
certainly than the mythical First 100 Days a U.S. President gets. It's critical
to DO SOMETHING, but frankly, flailing around aimlessly but vigorously like a
Rock'em Sock'em Robot usually doesn't work out. That's leaving it to chance.

Because of Angus' Law of Problem
Evolution, you have an advantage if you are
quite different from the previous manager(s). If the predecessor was an a$$hole,
it helps to be humane, if she was passive, it helps to be decisive, if he was an
hysteric, it helps to be samurai-calm. But in the end, your best chance of
success is having a plan adapted to the situation, and immediately but
deliberately executing against it...incrementally, relentlessly. And use the
techniques of Change Management: set expectations, communicate the changes and
the reasons for them, and most critically, enforce accountability.

There is no better stage to examine business or military or non-profits'
turnaround than Baseball. The National Pastime is the most transparent
billion-dollar institution that exists, and moves that management makes are
examined and broadcast. The subtleties hidden in the social structures of
corporations publicly-owned and private, officially guarded in the military,
unofficially aliased in non-profits, are all hung out to see in plain view in
Baseball -- and the highly measurable results, from wins and losses to to the
contributions of individual team-members, is exposed to the world. And between
the 30 major league Baseball organizations, there are a number of styles and
cultures and patterns that cover most legitimate organizations' equivalents.

For the last decade, a classic, transparent example of what I call a
Droopy-Dog organisation is the Baltimore Orioles. A team that through several
eras maximized management practices to make a relatively "small
market" franchise highly competitive has fallen on hard times, and it's
been so long since they won anything...

...that the organization gets riddled with Droopy-Dog-ism, the belief (you've
all heard it in some workplaces before) "that no matter what we do, it
won't work out" or "failure? it's just the way we are".

So two weeks ago, the Orioles fired their second manager of 2010 and hired
Buck Showalter, who last managed a promising Texas team to a bunch of
unremarkably medium finishes. His history and the immediate results of his
turnaround attempt?

As you can see from the table, in his first 11 games as an Oriole manager,
the squad has gone 9-2. While such an extreme turnaround requires a bit of luck,
in the Orioles, as well as in Beyond Baseball organizations that are endowed
with decent talent but are struggling, there's a bottled-up reservoir of
will-to-win.

¿So how do you tap into that to turn around a Droopy-Dog organization? Not
the Rigglemania Approach...if you want a stunning counter-example to plumb, here's
one from last year. But Showalter represents one very viable positive path.

BUCK'S ONE HIDDEN PRACTICE AND FIVE YOU CAN SEE
There are several ways to do this (all require the correct context), but in the
Baltimore Orioles' specific case, the beginning of the turnaround is measurably
good. One is hidden, something not generally shared with the public. And you can
see from reportage and by merely visually observing Showalter during games and
in interviews four visible practices that generally work.

The Hidden: Relentless acquisition of
data and relentless erasable whiteboard charting out of the season's plans
adjusted and tweaked before series and games.

As my buddy Talmage
Boston, who knows Showalter, said, Buck charts out a plan, gets it committed
to "paper" (a whiteboard) and adjusts it perhaps daily when opposing
pitcher assignments change or increased data gives him impetus to experiment.
But if he was abducted by space aliens,
his successor would inherit documentation of the plan complete enough to show
the logic of it, and the successor could carry it on.

If you have a turnaround to perform, starting with a structured plan that's
defined and documented enough to pass on to a helper or successor or your own
supervisor, but one that's got the design that can evolve as the season wears
on, is a critical, not always possible, approach. Buck is pretty relentless,
even for Baseball, which is significantly more relentless and goal focused and
accountable than corporate or military structures are.

Data --> Plan -->
Data --> Adjustments

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #1 - Intentional, Inevitable,
ImmediateIt's a classic Change Management strategy...from the first day, Showalter
made it clear the new regime was different, expectations were different, and he
would be unyielding in striving for success. The first messages were about
avoiding mental mistakes and execution (the things that you should almost always
succeed at if you pay attention, concentrate and commit. So many things in
worklife are tough and likely to go wrong that it's important to get the easy
stuff correct and if you can, you might turn a truly .445 team that's playing
.305 ball into a .445 team (or even a little better, if their attitude makes
them self-confident).

Part of that practice is to show everything is changing, that almost no s.o.p.
is assumed to be operating. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays got this down in their
turnaround...I've written in terrifying depth about that one aspect, here,
in three parts.

In Showalter's case it's been many things, but Aaron
Gleeman can point to a real break from standard practice that any Oriole can
see and feel the ripples from, suggesting changing to a six-man pitching
rotation. When you make public a suggestion like that, it deflects some heat
from players, giving the Commentocracy some meat to tear into and at the same
time making it clear to the world that just about everything from the past may
be altered.

Given the Birds' chronic struggles, this is a "good" thing, because
it's easier to get Droopy Dogs to perk up on seeing things actually changed (not
just talked about). and it immediately engages them in changes to their personal
roles, which leads directly to...

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #2 - Consequences &
Accountability
You declare and enforce the idea that everyone has to be accountable for
success. It's natural to give a relatively weak team in a killer division, like
the O's are, some slack. If you take every loss too seriously, and so many are
inevitable, people can burn out quickly. So it's critical with a young team to
simultaneously show you care a ton about winning, but not take every loss as
though it was a World Series Game 7.

An
earlier Gleeman article echoed a theme (several different players, all told
first face-to-face) that has been going on for over a week...that everyone is
going to have to justify his playing time by playing hard. From Gleeman:

Alfredo Simon took over closer duties in
Baltimore when he was called up from Triple-A in late April, converting 15 of
17 save chances with a 3.40 ERA and .248 opponents' batting average through
his first 30 appearances.

However, he's struggled lately, blowing two
saves and allowing seven runs in his last six games, and not surprisingly new
manager Buck Showalter is already talking about making some changes in the
ninth inning:

"I'm sure Simon will get some more
opportunities along the way, but I feel like we have some other people
capable of doing it other than him. We'll see what each night dictates.
Some guys down there have shown that they are capable of getting big outs
for us. He has above-average pitches but he's still got to locate them,
too. Guys can turn around a bullet up here."

Instead of the classic Droopy Dog behavior of letting it go because it
doesn't really make any difference anyway, he's telling the whole team that
execution is critical and will affect playing time, even in a role such as
closer, where stability is most critical. But broadcasting this message leads
to...

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #3 - Discipline
Discipline, like any other good thing has a yield curve. You can ramp it up to a
point beyond which you degrade performance. In Buck's past manager jobs, I
believe, he's turned up the military aspect beyond the optimal point ... we'll
see how much he's learned in the last few years, see if he can find a more
moderate plateau on which to make his stand.

But if everyone knows they need to please the boss to keep their job, and if
the boss is pushing accountability & concentration on small controllable
factors that are easy to adhere to with a little effort, they are very likely to
do it. And they are especially likely to do it if it extends to
"stars" like the closer. And even more likely to do it if the hammer
falls on one or two underperformers in the next few weeks. It's critical that
when you use this practice Beyond Baseball, you don't just lop off a few heads a
few days in. That's just capricious. You need to give everyone a chance to
succeed, or you're not being accountable yourself and that decimates the
power of change management. But acting on stated factors and enforcing
discipline leads to...

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #4 - Being 'In Charge'
If the manager is accountable and enforces discipline fairly and consistently
she can radiate the aura of being 'in charge', and this is a vital piece of
turnaround. Because when the manager tells people something is to happen and
will happen, if she's shown she's in charge, she trims much of the doubt (about
whether it's a good idea, about whether it's actually going to be executed,
about success when it's executed) and doubt, especially in a Droopy Dog
organization is overhead, that is, energy and attention invested in activities
that cannot add to success.

VISIBLE CHANGE PRACTICE #5 - Neither Respecting the
Inherited Situation or Disrespecting It
It's really difficult to do this last one. It takes more willpower than most
managers have.

You pretty much have to turn your back on the past. Avoid the temptation of
doing the opposite of everything your predecessor did...that Binary Thinking
will lead to great hope from the troops, but pointless avoidable failures in
practice.

Avoid Respecting The Past...the Rigglemania Failure linked to previously.
It's tempting to want to show your predeessor respect, especially if you worked
for him or her, especially if you know that the failure was beyond that person's
control. If you want Visible Practice #1 to succeed (everything is different
now), the last thing you want to do is make people comfortable with the idea
that the old system was okay.

Avoid Disrespecting the Past...bad-mouthing the prior manager. It's
classless, unnecessarily alienates any remaining friends or people who liked her
personally, and brings back memories of processes you want to move past
because they evoke low morale cognates.

Pay attention to the past in your planning and data. Ignore the past in your
communications.

BEYOND BASEBALL
If you inherit a Droopy Dog workgroup that needs turning around, it's a good
idea to start with the Showalter outline and system. Every context is
different, and if you don't make some tweaks to the basic design in response to
who is on your roster and their personalities, you'll underperform.

But Baseball in general, and the 2010 revision of Buck Showalter,
specifically, is a beacon of management wisdom for turnaround.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Every decision a team's
off-field management makes
has to balance
the baseball considerations and the non-baseball considerations
--Sandy Alderson

As I explained in Part
II, the pre-2010 Mariners tried an exciting but risky standards-busting
experiment: Try to prevent so many runs through a combination of an outlier
pitching-friendly home stadium a mix of great to acceptable pitching and a
close-to unprecedented quality of team defense that the amount of offense
required to win a trip to October would be unprecedentedly low. And that buying
that low level of offense to fulfill the effort would save a lot of money that
could go to the team's bottom line or the top line.

As Vince Gennaro can
tell you, the amount of money you need to move a team from 85 to 90 wins is
significantly more than to move it from 80 to 85 wins. But some offense
is required...but how little would be too little and how little would be just
enough?

Success at determining that demilitarized zone between "too
little" and "just enough" was going to determine the experiment's
success or failure. The 2009 team's offensive performance was a data point to
consider; dead last in the league in OPS+.

In 20-20 hindsight, his line-up featured one very legitimate lead-off hitter
(Suzuki) and one legitimate batter to bat fourth or fifth (Branyan) and one
batter (Sweeney) who would not insult your lineup if he batted seventh or on his
best days, sixth. No one else's performance justified them batting third or
clean-up or fifth, or even really, sixth.

So what would they do?

THE FOUR & A HALF KEYS TO THE Ms' 2010 RUN
PRODUCTION
The offense protocol Seattle had to work with was not standards-busting;
it was the norm. Teams with a shortstop
who can hit 25 homers or a catcher
who can slug .580 can play around with letting guys they're not sure about
play key offensive positions. The Mariners didn't have such benefits. They would
have to work the protocol of the four and half keys; they would need to produce
their significant offense from DH, First Base, the two corner outfielders, and
to an optional degree, Third Base.

At Right Field, they logically decided to stand pat. Ichiro Suzuki,
signed for the next season, perhaps the team's most recognizable figure and only
all-time record holder, slots in as a legit lead-off batter, and while he
doesn't get you power (unless someone throws at his head), you can buy that
elsewhere.

At First Base, the front office let their best OPS+ hitter, the health
question-mark Russell
Branyan, go and, given the market and their budget (left over after so much
allocated to Cliff Lee, as mentioned in Part
II), plugged in reasonably-priced glove man Casey Kotchman, whose 2009 line looked like this:

He's a left-handed hitter who has a swing that can pull the ball, and the
only affordance the Mariners' stadium provides is for left-handed flyball
hitters who pull the ball.

He's a big defensive upgrade (at a position that doesn't have a strong individual
defense contribution but does contribute to team defense since it
interacts with roughly 10 chances a game)

I think the Ms focused on the last bullet, considered the first two and
crossed their fingers. Of the four usual primary offense contributing positions
(DH, 1B, LF and RF), they knew they had a likely offensive downgrade at 1B they
hoped would be cushioned by better defense.

But Kotchman would not under any circumstances, be a batter other teams would
fear or even think extensively about (in his best offensive production
season, he was intentionally
walked once ...and that was to set up the double-play, not to get to
a weaker hitter behind him).

Essentially, without a breakout season, Kotchman was not going to provide an
offensive upgrade at first base.

At Third Base, the Mariners had another switch, allowing a player they
thought should be a legitimate #5 or even optimistically a #4 batter, but
who hadn't performed up to those offensive expectations, to move on. But Adrian
Beltre was one of the keys to their great team defense...while Third Base is not
the most critical positions defensively, he was arguable the best or second-best
in the league at the position. So this change could imperil the experiment if
they didn't pay attention to defense. They felt they could not replace Beltre
with a lumbering, concrete-handed slugger and they felt there was no-one
promising in the Ms spotty minor leagues to take a chance on. They signed Chone
Figgins, a lead-off hitter of some quality and who, at Age 31 in 2009, was
indicating some "old guy skills" acquisition; not power, but taking
walks (101 for the season compared
to the 69/season he'd averaged previously as a starter), which had gotten
Figgins' on-base average close to .400, roughly 40 points better than his
previous average as a starter. A second legitimate lead-off hitter, perhaps, but
on a team that already had one.

On the side of caution, of the seven seasons Figgins had gotten 20 or more
plate appearances in the Mariners' home field, he had only performed better than
his seasonal numbers twice and over those seven years had produced about 21%
less offense than he had in the rest of his games (pretty sharp decline). And
while Beltre's homers happened at about one every 25 at-bats during the years he
was a starter, Figgins was getting a homer about once every 122 at bats.

So while Figgins was not likely to erode Beltre's defensive contributions
much if at all, he was unlikely to keep up in power, even the disappointing (to
the Mariners) power numbers Beltre had put up. Equation at this point:
Kotchman (lower homer power) aligned with Figgins (lower homer power), and the
magical Suzuki (one could hope equaling his prior power output).

If the next-to-last in the American League power numbers were going to be
exceeded...or even equaled...it would require significant positive impact from
Left Field and D.H.

In Left Field, the team replaced young Wladimir "The
Willemstad Weed-Whacker" Balentien (OPS+ of 66) with Milton Bradley, an
excellent athlete who has a difficult history with some press guys, many
management guys but few teammates. Bradley had come in a toxic waste swap with
the Chicago Cubs, when the Ms sent the second-worst starter in franchise history
to the Windy City for the clearly-very-skilled but sometimes disruptive
outfielder. The hope for his ability to add to the offense was pretty-well
founded (20-20 hindsight aside). In the six
years from 2003-2008 inclusive, he'd been out of action a fair amount, but
in the 100 games a year he averaged, had been on base at a .390 clip, blasted
out an OPS+ of 132 -- better than any 2009 Mariner, and collected 15 homers per
shortened season. His 2008 year had been his best, his 2009 an emotionally
turbulent campaign which had been tied for his worst (still this worst
was an OPS+ of 99), but it was not as though at age 31, his agility and fine
motor skills had fallen off the table.

While it was not a given that Bradley could revert completely to the
2003-2008 model, it was not delusional to think he might not bounce half-way
back to his good-looking history from his sub-par 2009. And that half-way
PRO+, 116, is 50 points higher than Balentien's 66, more than enough to cover
the shear-off from Branyan to Kotchman. But if Bradley couldn't make up that
difference, no one else on the roster could (without an extraordinary season),
and given the significant dollar investment the team poured into Bradley &
Cliff Lee, and the owners' execs' commitment to showing a profit every season,
the front office wasn't going to get a stimulus package if the lien-up went into
a depression.

But this move and the money involved put ownership, which values
family-friendly warm fuzzies very highly (since the contemporary family-friendly
marketing concept in Pacific Northwest sports generally outweighs on-the-field
performance as a profit optimizer), really put them at the mercy of Bradley
maintaining an even keel. More than about any men's professional sports
franchise I can think of, the Mariners value their image of good citizenship and
family-friendly fuzzies.

The contingency plan in case Bradley imploded: the even-younger than
Balentien Michael Saunders (OPS+ unknown...true, his was 44 in 2009 but in the
slimmest of appearances. Unlike the move at 1B, where one could be fairly
confident there'd be at least some drop-off, LF was a shot in the dark, a big
bag of uncertainty). But on the power front, it couldn't look like a shift for
the better. While Balentien notched 20
or more homers at every level in the minors, about one every 17 at bats in
AAA, Saunders had notched more like one home run per 30 AB. Saunders was more
athletic and younger, so one could imagine that one day in a few years Saunders
could sport more pop than Wladimir, but not as soon as 2010.

Which put every last bit of hope the Mariners had of at least equaling their
previous year's offense (dead last remember...you really can't carry a drop-off
from that if you have hopes of a wild card, and there was no fact-based reason
to think it could be better) in getting absolutely mega-studly DH performance.

This is where the plan came off the wobbling rails, and that was because the
Seattle ownership has persistently not gotten the Alderson Wisdom down: the need
to balance field decisions against business decisions.

To kick off the 2009 season, they'd come up with the master stroke of signing
the original Mariner star (okay, there were other Mariners who qualified as
stars, but one who was really a star in the rest of the baseball world, too) Ken
Griffey Junior. This wasn't an on-the-field master stroke. Griffey Junior,
as you have seen from the chart of 2009 performances, wasn't even average for a
D.H. But while he wasn't producing remarkable on the field, he was kicking axe
at the box office, selling incremental tickets and making the city feel good
about the Mariners through the application of nostalgia and the belief, probably
founded, that Griffey Junior was headed to Cooperstown after he retired, and
this reprise would pretty much assure his Hall of Fame plaque would end up
featuring his head under a Mariners cap. So, with the owners and executives
above the front office valuing the business considerations of the team way way
way way more than the on-field ones,

At D.H., they re-signed Griffey Junior. Who of adult age would have
predicted that at age 40, Griffey Jr would be able to exceed the .411 slugging
percentage w/19 homers he'd hit as a 39 year old? Clearly someone on the
business side at the Mariners' offices. But with the Griffey
re-signing, the Mariners had no slack to make the Zdurienck Supremacy function;
there was no position on the field where they could get enough additional power
to lift the team from last place in that category. Yes, they still had
old Mike Sweeney who had been an adequate contributor in a minor role, but one
he would not be able to expand much given incurable injuries that prevent him
from playing the field except under dire circumstances.

The Designated Hitter spot, as
Earl Weaver figured out before he ever had to actually ink one onto a
line-up card, is a magnificent and high-return affordance for a team with a
run-prevention orientation. That's because DH gives you the chance to use an
incomplete (less-expensive, easier to find) player who can hit a lot but not
play the field. True, great DHes don't fall off trees in bushels, but an
abundance of quite good ones are easy to find.

AND ANYONE WHO EXECUTES PROJECTS OR EXPERIMENTS KNOWS,
NO SLACK...
...means the only way to succeed is massive bouts of good luck unsullied by any
significant bad luck. That was not to be.

The biggest single disruption was not on the defensive side, but on the
run-production side (because no matter how successful your run prevention engine
is, you still have to outscore your opponent to win a game) when (again
failing to sufficiently weight the on-field factors relative to the business
factors) management pressured Ms manager Don Wakamatsu to not just give Griffey
the main weight of the DH role, but to bat him 5th in 15 of the first 23 games.
This promotional feel-good nostalgia almost assured that whoever was batting
clean-up would get nibbled to death, since the consequences of walking the
clean-up hitter and facing Old Junior were close to non-existent. Bradley
started the season batting 4th, and then it was the In-No-Way A Heart Of The
Line-up batter Jose Lopez. With Old Junior anchoring the 5th spot, Bradley at
clean-up managed .059/.238/.235 and Lopez hammered a better but not
adequate.253/.282/.333.

From an on-the-field factors view Griffey pulled the team below the event horizon, and close-to-guaranteed the failure of the defensive experiment. With Griffey in the
line-up as DH, the Mariners yielded their easiest-to-fill
offensive boost. It was as though ownership had taken the nimble little Smart
Car Z-Man had designed and planted on it a glorious 3,000 pound hood ornament.
The Mariners elected to fritter their on-field design slack away in exchange for
a series of feel-good promotional
bobble-head opportunities.

Whitey Herzog, who went to Cooperstown this year for constructing successful
run-prevention teams would never have considered the possibility the 2010
Mariners experiment could succeed minus a Balrog of a DH. Nor would Earl or any
of the Baltimore front office guys he worked with. The bold experiment never got
a fair shake.

In Part IV I get to give you a positive example from this failed season. I'll
tell you the brilliant part of Z-Man's execution, his deft contingency planning
that any manager Beyond Baseball would be wise to mimic as part of planning a
bold experiment.

8/10/2010 07:26:00 AM posted by j @ 8/10/2010 07:26:00 AM

Monday, August 02, 2010

PART II - Advanced Experimentation 410: The Null Hypothesis Is Not A Dull Hypothesis

In Part I, I explained why the 2010 Seattle Mariners' front office
found themselves best served by a bold innovation.

In this part, I'll describe the innovation they chose to adopt as a working
hypothesis, that run prevention could be amassed in such concentration that
it could deliver escape velocity from the gravitational field of the Pythagorean
Principle (that a team's runs-produced and runs-allowed strongly shape their
win-loss record).

If that Mariners hypothesis worked, it would...

Free them from the expense of assembling a fully-featured offensive team,
substituting lesser-valued players whose lead attribute, defense, is
cheaper to buy in the 2009-2010 market than those players with noteworthy
offense.

Ambush the scouting of other teams who would not at first know the
workings of the hypothesis and once they knew it, would be challenging,
energy-consuming and time consuming to respond to.

To put a rational bold experiment together (Beyond Baseball, too), it
requires OMA...observation of past trends, measurement of past
effects, and analysis of relationships between factors. Here's the OMA
chain that led the Ms' front office to the experiment.

What to Implement to Maximize Run Prevention?
The 2009 and 2010 Seattle Mariners have a
modern statistically-oriented analytical function in the front office. And
the protocol among modern sabermetricians is that run-production (and by the
perfect double-entry math of Baseball therefore, run-prevention too) is made up
of three factors, one of which is heavily-affected by defense (the opponents'
batting average of balls put into play), one heavily affected by pitching (the
rate of issuing walks), and one moderately affected by pitching (home runs
yielded).

Putting it Together #1 - Team Defense
The M's 2009 campaign featured the most hit-preventing team defense (as
measured by relative Defensive Efficiency Rating) since 2001. The 2009 Ms
allowed Batting Average of Balls in Play at 91.3% of the 2009 American League's
composite average (.274
for the Ms, .300 for the AL), and the only team in the 21st Century to apply
such asphyxiating team defense was the record-shattering 2001 Mariners that won
116 games while allowing Batting Average of Balls in Play at a rate of 88.2% of
the 2001 American League's composite average.

As I stated in Part
I, the 2009 Mariners exceed the number of wins the Pythagorean thumbnail
estimation suggested they "should" have by eight, a very high and
fairly unusual difference. The 2001 Mariners (a legend everyone in the Mariners'
administration views with reverence) with their even-better relative team
defense, won seven more games than the Pythagorean thumbnail suggested they
"should". That is a lesson they couldn't overlook.

So, using a factor they could control, they were able to play around with
team defense, at least at the edges, to try to exceed the rather exxxtreme
accomplishment they'd notched in 2009. They moved a mixed bag of fielding
talent, 2009 2bman Jose López, to 3rd base where his strong arm would have more
positive value and his so-so range be less of a deficit. They gave the left
field spot, for most teams, a place to locate one's weakest fielding big bat, to
youngster Michael Saunders who'd looked a
little promising in the field in 2009, even though his bat wasn't yet
producing fully a major leaguer's output. They acquired the athletically-gifted
Chone Figgins to play second base, and even though it hadn't been Figgins'
primary position, he'd played at that spot occasionally over the first eight
years of his career, and as a better athlete with an apparently-better baseball
brain than his second-base predecessor, perhaps would add team defense (or
perhaps wouldn't neutralize the hoped-for benefit of moving López to third).
Finally, the team let the only possibly-legitimate middle-of-the-lineup
slugger they had on the roster, the injured first-baseman Russell Branyan,
leave, replacing him with a questionable bat with an acknowledged glove, Casey
Kotchman. So the team had put into the two positions most usual in roster
protocol to produce offense, LF and 1b, respectively, a very young, not-fully
developed player and a guy who could hit some, sometimes. This was a risky
pairing - if one or both produced offense near the top of their potential, this
team's offense was going to be anemic, but if one or both didn't produce near
the top of their potential, its was going to be sub-anemic.

But the Mariners front office put on the field a defense that should have
been even better than the 2009 squad at hit prevention. What about homers and
walks, the other two components that are part of the contemporary sabermetrics
protocol for run prevention?

So to put together this work of art and craft, the Mariners already
had a great canvas for laying on the homer-prevention component of run
prevention, the park they played 50% of their games in. In the other 50% of
their games, on the road, their 2009 pitching staff was precisely league average
in homer prevention.

And keep in mind, three of the teams that allowed fewer home runs were in the
same division as the Mariners, meaning not only did they get to face a
marginally-powered Mariner offense quite often, but also got to face it in the
Mariners' home park in a bunch of their road games (an affordance the Mariners
never got to have, since the Ms played none of their away games in their
homer-snuffing home park).

Putting it Together #3 - Walk Prevention/Overall
Pitching Quality
Tweaking the 2009 team as a base would require care. The 2009 team had great-looking
pitching overall (ignoring the home-away splits). At 4.27 runs per game
surrendered, the team was #1 in the American League

That 4.27 Runs/Game (the first column) is not only the best in the league,
but by a stunning margin of .25 R/G over the second best team. Why is a
quarter of a run stunning? Well, the difference between the 2nd best team and
the 5th is a mere .05 R/G, and to get to the team that's 0.25 R/G less effective
than the 2nd best team you have to get past the 12th best. It's such a
significant difference, the difference between #1 and #2 just about spans the
rest of the entire league.

The 2009 M's pitching is, by this measure, an extreme outlier. And it was, as
I pointed out in Part I, also an extreme outlier in its W-L record compared to
its Pythagorean projection. An inquisitive and observant manager in any field
would wonder if there might be a cause (incredible out-of-scope run-prevention)
and effect (outperforming pre-season expectations or outperforming Pythagorean
projection). What IF way-above normal defense bent the space-time
continuum and changed the gravitational field the Pythagorean affects. She might not presume it existed, but
she would at least be interested in if it was true.

Because if it was linked by some cause-and-effect, this
not-broadly-known insight would be actionable knowledge, that is, a competitive
edge. In the open market, pitching is seen as a very valuable commodity, so it's
generally expensive, but defense has been both difficult to measure and not
thought of as a critical factor in the high run-production era since the owners
juiced the ball after the 1993 season. I'm fairly sure no team has tried to make
defense its lead positive attribute since the end of practice of Deadball
strategies in the early 1920s. And just as the insights described in Moneyball
six years earlier had seemed a way to create more wins/dollar and something that
others would then have to chase, and many couldn't chase even if they wanted to
and knew how to (The Texas Rangers, for example, which have an
offense-stimulating stadium), competitors could be slow to adapt to this
possible Mariner revolution yielding a benefit that could last a while.

The coup de grâce for the 2010 rotation was Zdurienck's
acquisition of a starter who may have been potentially the best starter in the
American League, but certainly the best for this team. Because the
acquisition, Cliff Lee, rarely walks anyone (in 2009, 1.7 walks per 9 innings
pitched compared to the league average of 3.4), and his homers-allowed per 9
innings pitched was 0.7 compared to the league's 1.1). Roll in the Ms defense's
ability to snuff hits as a complement, and it looked to Zdurienck as though Lee
might notch his best season ever.

And compared to 2009, the season against
which Zdurienck was looking to improve,
Lee (potentially the best) would be replacing Carlos Silva (who
in 2008 and 2009 had been 5-18 with an ERA of 6.81).

ASIDE:
Z-Man had the opportunity to try to sign Cliff Lee, due to become a free
agent at the end of 2010, to a long-term deal before the perfect
Lee-glorifying scheme they'd put together had borne fruit, and many managers
in all fields would have thought it best to get in front of that, getting Lee
to commit before the probably-superb season played out. Z-Man didn't, and
that was brilliant, a lesson I'll talk about in Part III and one you should
follow.

So make a perfect alignment for run-prevention

Asphyxiating ballpark, unchanged;

Exxxxtreme defensive ability on the field, made more extreme;

Good pitching, improved

Thus, the hypothesis to be tested, perhaps offensive ability would become
less material.

Because the Mariners weren't using any of the standard operating
procedures for building a winning team, there was a big chance the hypothesis
would be null, that the experiment would not pan out.

And while the bold experiment didn't work for reasons I'll describe in Part III,
Z-Man's brilliance made it possible to come away with positives even if all the
Ms could prove was the null hypothesis, as I'll tell you about in Part III.